Let Your Photography Make You Happier and More Content

How often do you go back and look through old photos, even ones that did not make it into your portfolio? And how often do you really spend time with those photos, not just scanning them? It can be more valuable than you think, not just for your photography, but for your happiness and for finding deeper meaning. 

Coming to you from Alister Benn of Expressive Photography, this insightful video discusses the idea of using photography to relive experiences and to remember the joy you felt in those moments and promote happiness. It can be easy, particularly when you do photography for a living, to lose sight of this and to look at it as nothing more than a means to a (financial) end. However, we all first got into it because we loved creating photos. I personally catch myself scrolling through my favorites album on my phone and daydreaming about past happy moments all the time. Not only do those pictures serve as an easy way to relive those moments, regularly scrolling through them helps to keep the memories fresh in my mind. It does a lot of good for my happiness. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Benn.

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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Alex Cooke asked,

"How often do you go back and look through old photos, even ones that did not make it into your portfolio? And how often do you really spend time with those photos, not just scanning them?"

How often? About five days every week; sometimes every day throughout a given week.

How much time? On average, about twenty five minutes each day, on the days that I view old photos (which is most days). Although the average may be misleading, as any given day can vary far from the average. Some days it's only 5 or 10 minutes, other days it's an hour and a half or two hours.

So all tolled, I spend about two hours per week going through my photo archives. Yes, I know that the "correct" saying is "all told", but I prefer "all tolled" because I am specifically referring to all the time being tallied up, or counted, and not at all referring to things being spoken of or written of.